MySQL Public Worklog and Community Focus

MySQL made some tasks from their internal task tracking tool – Worklog a while back. I just have not look at it besides checking Maria related tasks until couple of days ago as Jay announced new Forge going live.Check it out – there are a lot of nice ideas out where. I can find a lot of things I originally submitted something like 5 years ago out there

I contributed most ideas during my first years at MySQL, some on my own some reformed customer suggestions from Sales/Support/Consulting engagements I was on. Later I practically stopped because there were not much attention to those small little convenience things – MySQL was on the road to take over enterprise market and all resources were focused on big things which allow to sell things to these customers.

In the recent months we’re seeing MySQL is somewhat turning back to its community which is mainly hundreds of thousands of web and small application developers. Actually working forge, MySQL developers on freenode IRC channel are few of the signs.

Indeed there is a lot of things to do still – for example Community Version served it commercial goals being advertised to the customers as something sub par to MySQL Enterprise version which cool guys use. It however got very little community developed features integrated into it.

Being acquired by Sun, I hope MySQL will not need to desperately show growth numbers to please venture capitalists and get high IPO valuation or sale price. On other hand Sun being serious player on Enterprise market may demand even more Enterprise features from MySQL as well as making current features more solid.

I hope however Sun will be smart enough to invest into allocating resources to features appealing to broad masses of MySQL Users.

So back to Forge and Worklog – as you can see now you can vote on the different tasks. This is one of the ways you can help MySQL to understand what you need from MySQL and I would encourage you to surely do it. Providing “community feedback” is even better as MySQL Development is often disconnected from the real life and may not take real life considerations into account which are obvious for you.

What seems to be missing is for community to add worklog tasks/feature requests which would be natural way of getting community ideas and with voting and commenting you would quickly see how many people find these ideas appealing. Though it may be planned for future updates.

Now we have worklog entries public and voting and commenting in place I would really see in a few months from now MySQL to show this feedback and votes are actually valuable by implementing some of the most voted/most desired features. This would be the way to show there is any reason to spend time voting and commenting – if this has no affect on development process, why should we bother ?

About Peter Zaitsev

Peter managed the High Performance Group within MySQL until 2006, when he founded Percona. Peter has a Master's Degree in Computer Science and is an expert in database kernels, computer hardware, and application scaling.

Comments

Thanks for promoting and blogging about MySQL Forge, Peter! There are lots of new things happening to the Forge code base, including open sourcing the whole thing under an OSI license as well as integrating Sphinx for all the search functionality. In addition, I will look into the feature request of adding new WL entries. As you know, there is the internal system which has to be reconciled as well, but that’s just a technical difficulty. See you in a couple weeks at the MySQL Conf.

It is great to hear it will be OpenSource. Regarding adding of worklog tasks I understand there is internal database and you do not need to get tasks where until they are approved. I just think it is very non natural to be able to only comment on ideas but not submit the new ones.

Yeah, much agreed about it being non-natural, I just have to figure out “what to do” with these proposed new tasks from MySQL Forge. Do I add them back into the internal DB? That would require integration and approval of engineering folks, which can be time-consuming… Do I simply mark them as “NEW” or “PROPOSED” somehow on the MySQL Forge and *not* add them into the internal worklog? Ideas welcome…

Well. The stuff on the forge can come from Worklog and from Community this is how I’d view it. Community ideas may later have worklog entries created as a base of them. The task numbering something you would have to figure out – what would those IDs mean.